There are two connections to this flick. The first is the broad theme represented in the title: that we as Braves fans are challenged to keep the faith. We are CHALLENGED to keep the faith. Like, this is one *#%..@% challenge.
But beyond that, Matt Wisler played the part of Alan Klein, the Bar Mitzvah trainee. I couldn’t find the exact quote, so you are going to have to accept a little paraphrasing. But basically, Ben Stiller’s rabbi says to Alan, “Don’t you understand, God is calling you a chump and you have to show him you aren’t a chump.” Well, Coppy called Wisler a chump, and it didn’t seem to bring out the moxie in him. Quite to the contrary, he got his butt kicked.
Fourth inning lead on back to back doubles by Adonis Garcia and Jeff Francoeur. Adonis with a lot of hustle and a dive to get in in front of the tag (well, actually, the ball wasn’t caught, but Adonis had it beat by about a foot if it was caught cleanly). Early Braves lead.
But, “chumpery” had its way as Wisler gave up 3 homeruns in the bottom of the fourth to put it at 5 to 1. Thereafter, the ultimate outcome never seemed in doubt.
Adonis fought. He later hit a solo home run. Everybody else said “Meh.”
Garcia is a fun player. He reminds me of Brooks Conrad. Folk Hero!
On the bright side, Dansby & Newcomb had nice games last night.
@2, Right on. In addition to Dansby, Albies went 2 for 5 and Dustin Peterson went 2 for 4 with a double. Good night for MS bats. Also note that Caleb Dirks had a solid inning of work for Mississippi. I bet we see him up soon enough.
BTW, are there any prospects at all on the DSL Braves to follow? I’ve never heard of any of those guys.
@3, I’ve never heard of him either, but I for one am rooting for Raysheandall Juliandru Vernon Michel, who was born in Curacao the year after Andruw homered in the World Series.
Dustin Peterson has 16 multi hit games since June 1st. Hitting .316 over those 41 games. He has 34 XBH this season in 360 AB with 30 BB and 65 K. Not bad for a 21 year-old who lost most of last season to a bus accident.
Matt Wisler has the 2nd highest ERA of any qualifying pitcher since the beginning of June. Sweet.
Raysheandall Juliandru Vernon Michel. Now that’s a name for the record books. Heck, his first name feels like its got three names loaded into one, his second name has two.
I wonder if his parents were The Sound of Music fans.
Juliandru’s favorite movie is actually Mary Poppins.
Bo Bichette is clobbering the GCL:
http://www.milb.com/player/index.jsp?sid=milb&player_id=666182#/career/R/hitting/2016/ALL
Wisler’s Mother
forbids her son to curve another
Our picture, that was meant to hang
your pitches, no, bang bang bang.
After Victor/Victoria, his coaches didn’t quite know what to do with him.
The GABP
holds no terrors for the likes of you and of me
we don’t have to pitch there
we do expect we would rather sit and bitch there.
Business Man’s Special tomorrow, Wednesday, first pitch 12.30…I will be there offering all the chance to share fresh insights into what ails us. Maybe Roger ailes us, could be. Our pitching coach, ya know.
Business Fan’s Special, blazon. How uncouth–and from a Brit, no less!
I know he strikes out a ton, but I’d love to stick Joey Gallo at 3B for the next 10 years.
Gallo is going to play the OF at some point.
I would like to roll the dice on Yasiel Puig for the right price.
@16, Alex Wood, Jim Johnson, Luis Avilan, Jose Peraza and the carcass of Bronson Arroyo. You think that’ll get ‘er done?
Rusty,
Well, I think the question is “what is the right price?” I don’t see the Dodgers moving him for “take the payments and don’t send us anything else.” They will want players. They might pay part of salary.
My thought is to target Braun. He can refuse a trade, but we can block a post deadline trade by claiming him. Tell Milwaukee we take the dollars and give nothing or we agree to accept them paying some dollars for some prospects.
Ian Anderson pitched for the second time today: 3 IP, 2 H, 2 BB, 2 K, 0 ER. Similar to his first start.
@17, I hadn’t realized that Arroyo was still in baseball, but it looks like he’s with the Nats’ rookie league team right now. Who’da thunk it? http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.cgi?id=arroyo001bro
Yeah, Bronson got signed right after spring training. Dusty and Bobby share the nostalgia disease.
Further to the discussion of PGammons and sportswriters running down the price of FAs like Julio, I don’t think Gammons reporting what the Red Sox tell him is nefarious or his trading access in exchange for acting as their disinformation agent. Rather, from what I’ve observed watching post game interviews and reading next day’s writeups, about 80% of what sportswriters do is simply transcribe what a coach or player says. It’s part laziness, part deadline, whatever, but just repeating verbatim what someone said is a layup already written article for tomorrow’s fishwrap. (The WaPo writers are really bad at this. Adam Kilgore especially — he recounted verbatim from Scott Boras how Scott Boras invented from whole cloth the concept of tanking for draft picks a couple years back and convinced the Nats to do it and see what a genius he is. Not kidding. But Boras or his people fed this malarkey to him and bingo, he’s done his column for tomorrow, no matter how absurd the column is. )
So when the Bosox GM says, under deep cover, that Julio is not worth his weight in poop, Gammons dutifully reports that he has heard INSERT ANONYMOUS QUOTE. It’s not that Gammons is secretly doing their bidding. He just was told this and he can truthfully say he was told it, and restates it in his Twitter/column/whatever without comment.
Jace was playing really good baseball and now he’s stuck back on the bench. Stick Jace at 2nd, Beckham at 3B, and let Frenchy/Garcia play in LF.
Also, Aybar should have been DFA’d already
@18 – It will be interesting to see what direction the FO goes in when they decide to build an offense. Without getting caught up in the names, I hope they go after Puig’s more than they go after Braun’s. There’s a lot more upside.
This is, of course, based on the idea that there is a great day a-coming when we will start to spend all the savings we’re so proud of, and we will stop turning players into magic beans, and start turning magic beans into players.
But, you are right, we are always going to have to be conscious of dollars.
@ 22
You bet. Aybar’s range was so horrendous last night the Red’s booth couldn’t believe it and said so. Some went within what appeared to be a yard of him. For Pete’s sake stop playing dollar games and get the two kids up. What we do with Aybar we should have had plenty of experience of with others in the last couple of years. Or bury him like that Japanese pitcher Komiache/Kassikomo, or whatever. Enough already.
There were whispers that Aybar had trade value a few weeks ago. The rumors of his resurrection seem to have been greatly exaggerated.
And continuing our annual tradition of having a few of the absolute worst players in baseball each season, we currently have #3, 4, and 7. If we keep Aybar, I like his chances to finish #1 BABY!
http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/batting/_/sort/WARBR/order/false
Aybar was starting to hit a little and looked like his fielding had improved. If the Reds announcers were that low on his range, I can imagine ML scouts will steer clear of him. I had a slight hope that if he got his BA up to about .230 we could trade him for a low ceiling non-prospect relief pitcher. I see no hope for that now. I can’t think of any reason to keep him.
I’m not a Castro fan, but I think he can at least OPS around .500 and play better defense. If not Castro, Kazmar or Landoni in AAA should at least be able to live up to the incredibly low standards that Aybar has set.
@25 – Interesting list. It’s hard to believe that ARod is at 24 and Teixeira is 28. Ryan Howard, Carl Crawford and Chris Johnson in the bottom 20 doesn’t surprise me at all.
There’s really no good reason for Aybar to even be on the roster when you have Beckham, Peterson, Adonis, d’Arnaud, and Frenchy available to man 4 positions. There are clear routes to take for righty/lefty match-ups, and Aybar is an unmitigated failure that needs to be acccepted. Those 5 players have both present and future value to the Atlanta Braves, and Aybar has no present and future value.
And I’m just sick of looking at him.
As bad as Aybar has been, Castro was worse. Castro is only #7 on that list because he played far less than Aybar and racked up less negative WAR. And I publicly endorsed Castro before the season to be a passable all-glove major league SS (in the mold of Ahmed)…Ahwell.
I really think he’ll be gone if we can’t move him in August. I’m not sure how this plays out in the marketplace, but I wonder if crappy veterans like Aybar (and like Gomes last year) see a little bit of a value increase once the dust settles on the non-waiver deadline. The teams that lost out on the real players might take a flyer on an artificial player like Aybar. By that time or at least by end of August/September, hopefully we’ll be treated to a Dansby or Ozzie sighting.
Maybe Aybar will don a United States flag clown-suit and worm his way into the hearts of the fans of the eventual World Series champions?
Nobody is going to want to add the worst players in the league for their playoff push.
The only reason he’s on the team and playing so much is that we’re losing on purpose.
Gomes actually had a .689 OPS and ran into 7 fastballs. The only thing Aybar runs into with frequency is meatballs.
@16
Yasel Puig
we will admit to a certain level of intrigue
his Cuban connection
a contract that demands we make a daily inspection.
I’m also available to play shortstop for the league minimum for a contender if they don’t care about how bad their shortstop is.
krussell @ 32,
But could we trade Aybar to the Twins, maybe?
I think firing the GM means intentional tanking is over?
They weren’t intentionally tanking. They went 83-79 in 2015 with a team full of young players like Sano, Arcia, Kepler, and Buxton whom they hoped would improve. There were some people suggesting they might be a dark horse playoff contender in 2016. It just all went to hell. That’s why they fired the GM.
I mean, if you trade for Aybar, you’d be intentionally tanking.
Well, at this point, they should be. The not tanking strategy sure didn’t work. Now, they have to turn into the skid.
It’s hard to say what their strat even is. They have the most pedestrian pitching staff and a lot of bad players. Sano has been pretty good, and Buxton just needs time (very unlikely he’s really this bad).
@25 At least we’re not tied to any of those guys long term, which is an improvement over the days of Uggla/BUpton
So far, in his career, Chris Johnson has been paid $32 million to amass -1.0 WAR. I wonder how many players have earned more to be sub-replacement for their careers
@43, And that includes a season where he was competing for the batting title. Gotta admit: That’s impressive.
Tyrell doesn’t quite know where the ball is going.
I like Recker. He’s fundamentally sound defensively.
Reds pitcher’s command isn’t a whole lot better than Jenkins’. This is an aesthetically unpleasing baseball game.
Tyrell’s doing fine, thank you. Good job, kid.
Frenchy, however, is a wasted roster space.
What’s up with all of these blazing fast pitches in MLB? Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Cabrera now threw 103.8 MPH. Are MLB GM’s having pissing matches? I wonder if GM’s direct managers/players to do things like this. Both teams are active in the trade market, and specifically Chapman is being shopped, so my conspiracy theory is Cashman’s telling Chapman to air it out. Coppy could be shopping Cabrera.
Aybar runs into chicken bones too.
Wonder what Theo would want for Javier Baez?
That was the most Francoeur at bat ever
Super Dario also pitched well.
Hope lurks.
Gotta hand it to Tyrell. Wasn’t sharp, (probably) got squeezed by blue, and battled through.
I wouldn’t mind trading Jim Johnson for Caleb Dirks or Shae Simmons, ifyaknowhatI’msayin’.
Wentz promoted to Danville.
Andrelton would have been handy right there.
::Dansby Swanson:: would have been handy right there.
::Ozzie Albies:: would have been handy right there.
::Daniel Castro:: would have been handy right there.
The only thing good about Aybar is that you can change his name to Aybad. Actually, that’s a really great thing. So there’s nothing good about Aybar at all. Nothing.
(Aybar, attempting to turn a DP, throws the relay past Freeman and into the dugout)
…hey, anyone else notice that this Aybar character is terrible?
So – at present, Aybad, AJP and Castro rank as three of the seven worst players in baseball. None are under contract beyond this season, leaving this riddler: who are the 2017 Braves going to acquire who can fill that necessary ‘worst player in the league’ role?
We have some promising young arms and some fully cooked geezers. God only knows why we’re an old folks home, but Aybad, Frenchy and, though I like them, AJP and JJ need to call it quits.
Contracts expire at season’s end? Perhaps Coppy’s letting play out the string because some team may see a need for them.
Aybad needs to be in the Glossary. That’s a classic
Terrible base running
Now there’s a drunk on the field.
Sick of Aybad.
Cabrera is awesome
Miguel ‘Easy Gas’ Cabrera.
Recapped.